Empreintes florales, 2025

Céline Pinckers  

Contemporary Belgian textile artist, born in 1984.
Graduated from HELMo Mode in 2005, Céline Pinckers began her creative path in fashion, where she developed an early fascination for ancestral textile techniques and the expressive potential of the body. Her initial work focused on women's lingerie, which she designed and distributed internationally until 2013 under the label Céline Pinckers – Poétic Lingerie. These years were marked by collaborations with writers, photographers and performers, as well as presentations during the Fashion Weeks of Paris and Porto.

A Free and Intuitive Practice

Gradually, her practice moved away from the constraints of the fashion industry — its rhythms, economic pressures and functional imperatives — toward a more liberated, experimental territory. Collaborations with dancers and performance companies played a decisive role in this transition, allowing her to reconnect gesture, movement and material in a more instinctive way.

This shift led her to explore time-intensive techniques such as embroidery, beadwork and featherwork, practices incompatible with commercial production but deeply aligned with her sensitivity and need for precision. Over time, the body itself faded from representation, becoming fragmented, transformed, and eventually absent, giving way to a purely textile and symbolic language.

An important transitional phase in her work was the series Roman anatomical, presented notably at Art Sablon (VDK/JFK Gallery, Brussels, 2017) and at Cinéma Nova (Brussels, 2016). Structured in “chapters" devoted to organs, bones and anatomical elements, the series explored the body through metaphor, memory and symbolism.

Since 2021, Céline Pinckers has devoted herself primarily to contemporary embroidery, developing a form of lyrical abstraction in which thread becomes gesture and surface becomes a sensitive field of exploration.

Between Sensitivity and Inner Tension

Her embroidered works invite slow contemplation. They oscillate between control and spontaneity, rigor and intuition, silence and intensity. Through repetition, layering and meticulous handwork, Céline Pinckers seeks a fragile balance between structure and emotion, material presence and inner resonance.

Her recent works have been exhibited at Phlau Gallery (Liège, 2023), the Centre Wallon d'Art Contemporain (Flémalle, 2024), the Centre d'Arts du Rouge-Cloître – Prix Découverte (Brussels, 2024), and Galerie Openbach (Paris, Vincennes, 2025). She was also selected for a solo exhibition at the Espace Jeunes Artistes of the Musée de la Boverie in Liège (September–October 2025).